How AI Will Transform Roblox Games into Photorealistic Worlds | CEO David Baszucki

1. 0:00 – 0:36

   Cold Open

   1. EGElad Gil0:00

      What proportion of you think your children will have at least one serious relationship with an AI throughout their lifetime?

   2. DBDave Baszucki0:05

      I think zero right now.

   3. EGElad Gil0:06

      Yeah.

   4. DBDave Baszucki0:06

      I don't think we're close to crossing the human-AI barrier, but it is worth thinking. Things are changing every day. We have to incorporate and do that. And then there's also some weird universal truths [chuckles] of things that stick around for forty years, and you kind of have to blend them together. We feel if we build Roblox right, it might be the kind of thing that's kicking around in forty years.

   5. SGSarah Guo0:35

      [upbeat music]

2. 0:36 – 1:16

   Dave Baszucki Introduction

   1. SGSarah Guo0:36

      Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, Elad and I are here with Dave Baszucki, the founder and CEO of Roblox, the 3D immersive world where more than one hundred and fifty million users come every day to hang out. We talk with Dave about the future of AI in gaming, their investments in AI, how NPCs are going to change and really transform game, Roblox's Studio, one of the largest coding platforms out there, and their twenty-year mission to build the Holodeck. Welcome, Dave. Dave, thanks so much for doing this with us.

   2. DBDave Baszucki1:08

      It is so great to be here, and thank you for doing this in Roblox headquarters.

   3. EGElad Gil1:12

      Yeah, exciting to be here.

   4. DBDave Baszucki1:14

      Yeah, great to have you guys. Thanks.

3. 1:16 – 5:29

   Realizing Robolox’s 20-Year Vision

   1. EGElad Gil1:16

      So I think we want to start with a big-picture question. I think, um, you all have been really visionary in terms of where all this is heading, and AI is obviously having a big wave and effect on gaming and what's going to happen in the future there, and that's across things like world models. How do you think about NPCs and their evolution? Uh, how you think about assets within games, how you think about world creation. So we'd just love to hear your views of, like, big picture, ten years from now, where are we going? Like, what's coming?

   2. DBDave Baszucki1:41

      Yeah, so two-step on this one. I would say first, I know you both dabble in investing a little.

   3. EGElad Gil1:46

      Yeah.

   4. DBDave Baszucki1:46

      So there is, there is a Roblox business plan PowerPoint deck from almost twenty years ago that we pull out sometimes, and we're amazed at the fidelity of it. It, uh, portends a new category. One could call it the category of human co-experience. It's got the sizes of a bunch of companies from twenty years ago, so you can see social networking companies, you can see YouTube video, you can see toys, and you can see all of that. And what this-- what it imagined is really a new category. Some have called it the metaverse, some have called it the, the Holodeck, which is really the ultimate high-fidelity simulation where people can come together and do stuff.

   5. EGElad Gil2:28

      Feels like a Ready Player One, the movie.

   6. DBDave Baszucki2:30

      The... Exactly.

   7. EGElad Gil2:31

      Yeah.

   8. DBDave Baszucki2:31

      And so we do have that business plan slide, and, and what we had always imagined is if this high-fidelity space was backed by physics simulation and reality simulation, you'd be able to do stuff. You'd be able to build a car, put wheels on it, drive it around. You'd be able to go to a birthday party and blow out the candles. You'd be able to chop trees down and make a, a house of it. So that, that was literally the genesis of Roblox, and here we are, twenty years later, there's so much more to do. But one vision of AI is how do you superpower the creation of that Holodeck, and how do you get it photorealistic as soon as possible? How do you get ten thousand people in it instead of a hundred? How do you do acoustic simulation that sounds realistic with ten thousand people? So in that sense, AI is super interesting about just trying to get a vision that's been around for twenty years and has arguably been in sci-fi, once again, Snow Crash, Holodeck, forever. Um, there is another interesting vision, and, and I think it's useful comparing these product, um, things. There's much more, "What's the future of just a single person by themselves dreaming what they want to dream?" And, um, we sometimes call that real-time dreaming category. It's a category that, uh, we can see a bit of the trappings of with short-form video. There's a little bit of that in short-form video. You know, someone's two AM in their bed, doom scrolling.

   9. EGElad Gil4:05

      Uh-huh.

   10. DBDave Baszucki4:05

       It's reacting to dwell time. It's reacting to what you favorite, and you're kind of getting a little bit of a pre-built dream. That, I think, we sometimes imagine could go all the way to the famous Tom Cruise movie, to Vanilla Sky, where he literally real-time dreamed for several years in an imaginary universe where everyone around him was primarily an NPC, and, um, he didn't even know he was doing it. So that, that-

   11. SGSarah Guo4:33

       So that's more world-building as content-

   12. DBDave Baszucki4:36

       That, that is exactly right

   13. SGSarah Guo4:37

       ... in a continuing way. Yeah.

   14. DBDave Baszucki4:37

       And so if you, if you put those at two extremes, one is communication platform, high fidelity with people you know, the other is real-time dreaming, where everyone's an NPC. Everything in between is possible, and I think we see everything in between ultimately as being possible, and we may see weird product categories we never imagined. You know, I, I think people are probably thinking, "Does the text prompt turn into a voice prompt, and does it automatically turn into a video prompt if there's, like, I want to learn French?" Video, how you're in a French café, start talking to an NPC. So I think, I think, I think there's a wide range of products that start to get into this space we're interested in, which is kind of that 3D reality space.

4. 5:29 – 8:22

   Using 4D Immersive Simulations in Virtual Interactions

   1. EGElad Gil5:29

      Do you think that same space will exist for both consumer and business applications? Because people also talk about this in the context of you're-- instead of doing a Zoom, why don't you go into a shared space with someone and meet with that?

   2. DBDave Baszucki5:38

      I, I think, um-

   3. EGElad Gil5:39

      Or, you know, what degree of your life becomes virtual in that way?

   4. DBDave Baszucki5:40

      Yeah, we have seen, um... I think on the communication side, people just want more and more fidelity. We can go back to paintings on the wall of a cave. People want more fidelity. We have smoke signals. We have the mail system. We have the Pony Express.

   5. EGElad Gil5:56

      [chuckles]

   6. DBDave Baszucki5:56

      We have the telegraph system-

   7. EGElad Gil5:59

      Uh-huh.

   8. DBDave Baszucki5:59

      We have the phone system. We have the, arguably, the COVID-initiated video. Uh, we also did have the COVID-initiated 3D experience on Roblox, actually, and, and we found side-by-side video, a lot of young people used Roblox as an early test case of how to co-experience.... I think as the technology for multiplayer 4D simulation gets better and more photorealistic, it's almost gonna be like video is the downsampling. And it's like, if, if we were having this, um, 4D immersive communication, we'd say, "Go to legacy analog mode," and make it look like Zoom, basically.

   9. EGElad Gil6:40

      Uh-huh.

   10. DBDave Baszucki6:40

       And, and we could always do that, but we'd be able to do things we could never do on Zoom. You know, you'd say, "Hey, let's pop up and go walk around my office, and I, I wanna show you something. Come and follow me," kind of thing. So I do think the 4D simulation, as it gets photorealistic, will be a super set of video. The, the other thing for business is, um, there's a few things that 4D-- and I use 4D because it's not just 3D shape, but it's function in a way, will provide that video does not provide, is acoustical things. And there, there's some real tricky physics problems when there-- you're having a company meeting of 1,000 people. If we try to do it on Zoom, we have, like, a bunch of squares. What's... Who's live? Who's not live? How do we mix the sound? Which is very tricky. If we do it in a, a three-dimensional simulation, I can hear everyone with attenuation, based on how far they are, and it can actually be a much more natural experience. Like, I, I walk closer to you, and I, I hear you, and that, that may actually be a better human interface paradigm. There's one final technical thing that's gonna be very, very difficult, is when people try to sing "Happy Birthday" to you together. [chuckles] And because no matter whether you're on Zoom or whether you're in a 3D simulation, you're hearing them, like, 30 milliseconds later.

   11. EGElad Gil8:04

       Late, mm-hmm.

   12. DBDave Baszucki8:04

       So what I think we're gonna find is people are actually allowing each one of us to sing "Happy Birthday" with a time-forward extrapolation of each other and then remixing it. So I do, um, to-- you know, for the business side, I do think, ultimately, we're gonna see some interesting conferencing

5. 8:22 – 11:50

   Physics Engine vs. Photorealism

   1. DBDave Baszucki8:22

      solutions.

   2. EGElad Gil8:23

      Roblox has this amazing wild story with physics simulation, eh, or physics engine, as, like, part of the, the birth of Roblox.

   3. DBDave Baszucki8:31

      Yeah.

   4. EGElad Gil8:31

      But then today, or, or for the last decade, I have, um... I think of this as a immersive world where people have their first coding experiences. They build amazing games. They interact with each other. I don't think of that world as been s- as being super focused on realism.

   5. DBDave Baszucki8:46

      That's right.

   6. EGElad Gil8:47

      Um, so is that something that's changing for you guys? Is it enabled now? Like, how, how should we think about that?

   7. DBDave Baszucki8:52

      I think what you, um... The way I would think about it is we're pushing really hard on the physics simulation capability, and at the same time, we have this incredible free market that we can't control on content generation.

   8. EGElad Gil9:06

      [chuckles]

   9. DBDave Baszucki9:06

      I, I would say we are just started talking about full acoustic simulation. I just tweeted about it. So actually, you know, proximate, you know, attenuation and all of this kind of things and echoes, that's gonna start happening. On the physics simulator, it's behind the scenes, gotten better and better and better. It'll keep getting better. But what we have found, I, I would say, is the diversity of developers are beyond our expectation, and I, I would say some of the things that have gone viral, Dress to Impress, for example, Grow a Garden, are less physical. Um, but they have leveraged cloud capabilities, um, that we've built side by side. You know, G- Grow a Garden was essentially able to build an experience where ka- things keep growing even when you're not there, by leveraging a lot of the cloud persistence we provided. Uh, Dress to Impress was able to do some very interesting things with how they run contests and layer clothing on. So I think we're generally... You know, the specification for our product could be: We just wanna simulate the real world with 10,000 people, and the more we go in that direction, the more we'll just see creators using it in different ways.

   10. EGElad Gil10:20

       How much attention have you been paying to world models and what's been happening in the AI world, in terms of how people are shifting how they do physics simulation, right?

   11. DBDave Baszucki10:28

       I think we're really watching it. I think that the biggest thing we have focused on, and I think we'll continue to focus on, is how do we get that 10,000-player multiplayer-type experience, and how do we fall back to 100 or 10 or one? We feel it's super robust to build a communication platform, and, you know, that's part of our goal of getting to 10% of gaming. The, the technology for this, uh, I think we're gonna start unraveling it over the next five to 10 years, is what's the most efficient way to synchronize the state of 10,000 people?

   12. EGElad Gil11:05

       I see.

   13. DBDave Baszucki11:05

       A- and, and when we-

   14. EGElad Gil11:06

       It's an infrastructure problem versus necessarily a physics simulation.

   15. DBDave Baszucki11:09

       How do we-

   16. EGElad Gil11:10

       Yeah

   17. DBDave Baszucki11:10

       ... synchronize the state and the memory over the last five hours of 10,000 people? Where have they been? Um, where have they been in 3D space, and what have they been doing? The, the world model thing is very exciting 'cause they're storing memory, literally video latency. You know, a minute of frames, it's showing super early promise.

   18. EGElad Gil11:32

       Uh-huh.

   19. DBDave Baszucki11:33

       I think the technical revolution is gonna be, what's the ultimate synchronized state for 10,000 people? Is it in video latency? Is it in much more native 3D format? Is it a hybrid new discovery of some 3D video latent space? To be determined. I, I

6. 11:50 – 14:00

   Storing Roblox History as Vector Data

   1. DBDave Baszucki11:50

      will share that the format we're using, part of the vision for us is to ultimately store the history of everything on Roblox and to store it, not raster like video, but store it vector, which means the ability, um, to play back anything that's ever happened on Roblox. That's 13 billion hours-

   2. EGElad Gil12:11

      [chuckles]

   3. DBDave Baszucki12:11

      ... a month. Um, and so the ability-

   4. EGElad Gil12:14

      What do you think that does for you, the history of your world?

   5. DBDave Baszucki12:17

      Um, so there's a, there's a sci-fi book by Arthur C. Clarke called The Light of Other Days, which, um, talks about the fantasy of what would happen if we had infinite playback in our world. It's like a real social-... problem, um, because if everything we've ever done can be played back, um, actually, in that sci-fi book, it's not just everything could be played back, but you could look at any playback-

   6. EGElad Gil12:43

      Uh-huh.

   7. DBDave Baszucki12:43

      -and so everything's completely transparent. There's no private conversations. It actually delves into that. I think for us, we would then use it very thoughtfully, and privacy compliant, and judiciously, but for, uh, very simple things, you can imagine, "Ah, there was a safety incident. Let's go back and put five cameras, and listen to the audio, and see what happened-

   8. DBDave Baszucki13:07

      Mm-hmm.

   9. DBDave Baszucki13:07

      -and make a good judgment call." That's kind of interesting. Um, there, there's a really special thing that maybe I did with someone in my family that's really special. Given I have access to my history, go play that back, and possibly because it's 3D vector data, not raster data, reshoot it from a... Make a cool video-

   10. DBDave Baszucki13:31

       Mm-hmm

   11. DBDave Baszucki13:31

       ... of the best moment.

   12. EGElad Gil13:33

       Yeah.

   13. DBDave Baszucki13:33

       And I think where it ultimately ends up for us is there's a huge push now for people to find kind of hybrid video, ASDW, human interaction data. People are starting to train on video with keyboard stuff, and like, where do I find 200 million hours of this data? The data we have, which is 13 billion hours a month, is, can be reproduced from any camera angle and can, uh, interact with

7. 14:00 – 18:05

   Training NPCs - Moving Beyond LLMs

   1. DBDave Baszucki14:00

      the 3D space, so it's very powerful data. It leads to a really interesting computer science program, um, idea around how to create great NPCs that are more than just an LLM.

   2. EGElad Gil14:12

      Okay, tell us more about that. Actually, that sounds really interesting.

   3. DBDave Baszucki14:15

      Yeah, go check out on X or X Feed. I think in the last day or two, we released a bunch of, uh, native video demos, and maybe we can even play them back here. But what, what we are starting to train is NPCs based on a combination of all of the data we have in a privacy-compliant way-

   4. EGElad Gil14:32

      Uh-huh

   5. DBDave Baszucki14:32

      ... that are starting to navigate and starting to play games. The challenge, I think, um, would be, um, challenge level one, everyone has access to an NPC that can get pretty good at playing any Roblox game.

   6. DBDave Baszucki14:48

      Mm-hmm.

   7. EGElad Gil14:48

      Uh-huh.

   8. DBDave Baszucki14:48

      Super cool.

   9. DBDave Baszucki14:49

      Challenge level two is by watching, if I so opt in in a privacy-compliant way, my behaviors, the way I act, literally my gestures, the way I look at things, the way I talk-

   10. EGElad Gil15:01

       Uh-huh

   11. DBDave Baszucki15:01

       ... um, would we allow you to have your own virtual doppelgänger if you wanted?

   12. EGElad Gil15:06

       Oh, that's fascinating.

   13. DBDave Baszucki15:07

       Um, and then-

   14. EGElad Gil15:08

       Yeah

   15. DBDave Baszucki15:08

       ... um, number three would be is if I, if I have a good virtual doppelgänger, um, just as agentic is all the buzz in other areas, is there a simple user interface for agentic virtual doppelgängers? And that, that starts to get interesting-

   16. EGElad Gil15:24

       Yeah

   17. DBDave Baszucki15:24

       ... 'cause one could imagine sending their virtual self out to go do something. It could be, you know, my, my son or my daughter wants to play with me, I'm having to do some work. Could my virtual doppelgänger fit in for 15 minutes?

   18. EGElad Gil15:40

       Uh-huh.

   19. DBDave Baszucki15:40

       Sure, that's great.

   20. EGElad Gil15:41

       Yeah. [chuckles]

   21. DBDave Baszucki15:41

       You know, that could be really interesting. Um, and there's a lot of other, um, things, just like we're gonna see agentic space in the 2D, and the workspace, and the productivity area. I think it's gonna be interesting to imagine.

   22. EGElad Gil15:53

       So you're basically using these 18 billion hours a month to train-

   23. DBDave Baszucki15:56

       Thirteen billion.

   24. EGElad Gil15:57

       Thirteen billion-

   25. DBDave Baszucki15:58

       Yeah

   26. EGElad Gil15:58

       ... excuse me, uh, to train-

   27. DBDave Baszucki15:59

       Native-

   28. EGElad Gil16:00

       A native NPC

   29. DBDave Baszucki16:00

       ... NPC model.

   30. EGElad Gil16:01

       Yeah.
8. 18:05 – 19:54

   The Future of the Game Designer

   1. DBDave Baszucki18:05

      What do you think the role of, like, a Roblox game designer or any game designer is five, five years out from now? Do you think it's different?

   2. DBDave Baszucki18:14

      I think, I think I'm optimistic that typically, industrial revolution or whatever revolution-- I think we've chatted about stuff like this before-- there's a thought that there won't be any jobs after this. I think I'm a little bit more optimistic that-... a new class of things will show up.

   3. DBDave Baszucki18:35

      Mm-hmm.

   4. DBDave Baszucki18:36

      And the, I think there's a huge opportunity for more creators. I think, you know, I, I'm not to the point where I believe, you know, what we call AI slop today is gonna take over. Like, I think the human touch has got a long runway on it. So you could imagine, um, more diversity or quality of experiences, um, supplemented by AI. So, but I do think, um, the role will be more leveraged, and the quality coming out of five people will be astounding.

   5. DBDave Baszucki19:09

      Mm-hmm.

   6. DBDave Baszucki19:10

      You know? But we'll come to expect that quality. So quality will go up. I think, uh, iteration on testing will go up. I think where we see platforms like Roblox going is just as, um, people are starting to spin up agents to develop code, I think people, hopefully on the Roblox platform against the Roblox cloud, you'll be able to go away for 24 hours and your agents are gonna be like tweaking and testing, spinning up a Roblox ex- experience, sending 20 NPCs into them on various client emulators.

   7. DBDave Baszucki19:47

      That's fascinating.

   8. DBDave Baszucki19:47

      There's an NPC on a phone, there's an NPC here tuning the game. So hopefully, you'll feel more power in what you're building.

9. 19:54 – 23:53

   Video Latent World Models

   1. DBDave Baszucki19:54

      I'm also curious, there's, um, a set of research around world models, and I'm, I'm sure you've seen, that is just trying to directly generate game experiences-

   2. DBDave Baszucki20:03

      That's right

   3. DBDave Baszucki20:03

      ... with, like, there's no physics engine underneath. Like, you don't control the mechanisms, it's just video. What's your view on that?

   4. DBDave Baszucki20:10

      I think it's, like, a super exciting, interesting thing to think about.

   5. DBDave Baszucki20:14

      Mm-hmm.

   6. DBDave Baszucki20:15

      I think, like I said before, I think one thing is gonna be the higher the fidelity, is memory stored in video latency?

   7. DBDave Baszucki20:24

      Mm-hmm.

   8. DBDave Baszucki20:24

      Or does there need to be another research breakthrough-

   9. DBDave Baszucki20:27

      Mm-hmm

   10. DBDave Baszucki20:27

       ... where memory is ultimately stored in some new latent space that's 3D or four dimension? But the fidelity is amazing. I think that's really beautiful, and I, I think that the, the way we would see the ultimate architectures of these platforms is probably, for a while, not an all-in-one thing. We would probably see some hyper-efficient thousand-person synchronisation state engine.

   11. DBDave Baszucki20:53

       Mm-hmm.

   12. DBDave Baszucki20:53

       We might also see some of the photorealism not being done server side, but being done in intermediate spaces or client side as, as well, and we may see multi-step pipelines, where there's the raw framework, there's 3D upsampling, then there's local 2D upsampling. We're actually going, "Oh, my gosh," like, people are putting together a bunch of pieces. You know, dedicated NPC capability, dedicated synchronisation capability, 3D upsampling, 2D upsampling, and potentially world model stuff. You know, world model, um, you know, y- you could imagine that being used even in its early state today, rather than maybe a gameplay state. Where rather than making a video, you talk about the video while you walk around, and you kind of say, "Put me in a Western world. I want to go left, I want to go right. Add a few horses," and that video actually goes to a multiplayer experience. You-- One could imagine that. I think what a lot of other people are wondering is the short-form video, does someone hit it just like they did with short-form video into a highly retentive, like, local dreaming product that could just react to what you're doing? I think it's still early for both of those, but it's a big possibility. I, I would say that we are doubled down on a, a hybrid multi-AI tech stack that supports multiplayer natively.

   13. DBDave Baszucki22:17

       Yeah. I, I think one of the ideas that's, like, internationally very interesting has been the idea that you could generate, um, like serial micro dramas as-

   14. DBDave Baszucki22:26

       Absolutely

   15. DBDave Baszucki22:26

       ... a form that is not yet that popular in the West, but seems like a good format for the technology.

   16. DBDave Baszucki22:32

       Micro dramas, I've watched a few. I mean, it's really interesting. You know, a few-- It's fun to see, like, some entrepreneurs tried to do that, I won't mention who, like five or ten years ago-

   17. DBDave Baszucki22:40

       Yeah, right

   18. DBDave Baszucki22:40

       ... then they naturally emerged kind of thing. It's interesting to think if those micro dramas are easier to produce, they don't need live actors, but, you know, what is the plot line that really resonates? You know, we'll, we'll see with that.

   19. EGElad Gil22:56

       And you can mass test that at scale if you're using AI, right? You can actually have-

   20. DBDave Baszucki22:59

       That's right

   21. EGElad Gil23:00

       ... you know, a very large number of iterations. This is kind of one of the arguments people make around the Fermi paradox of, like, why haven't we seen alien life? And the idea is, it's just there's alien life, they're just stuck in these virtual worlds now, where, you know- [chuckles]

   22. DBDave Baszucki23:12

       [chuckles]

   23. EGElad Gil23:12

       ... it's funner than the real world.

   24. DBDave Baszucki23:13

       I haven't heard that.

   25. EGElad Gil23:13

       Yeah.

   26. DBDave Baszucki23:13

       Like, what's the famous quote? "Where is everyone?"

   27. EGElad Gil23:17

       Yeah, exactly.

   28. DBDave Baszucki23:18

       Um, where is it?

   29. EGElad Gil23:18

       So one option is they're in some virtual landscape that's more compelling than the real world-

   30. DBDave Baszucki23:23

       Yeah, it could be
10. 23:53 – 27:26

    Social Simulation - AI Companions and Virtual Relationships

    1. EGElad Gil23:53

       Yeah.

    2. DBDave Baszucki23:54

       Are there experiences that you imagine from a, like, a communication or a social perspective that, um, you think are gonna be, uh, just different or new, or that you're gonna have real insights into from these, like, really great NPCs, right? Because I'm sure you've seen what has r- happened with the rise of AI companions and how engaging they are, given they're just text interfaces.

    3. DBDave Baszucki24:16

       There's a, there's some fun things that... Like, there's a Black Mirror dating episode.

    4. DBDave Baszucki24:20

       Right. [chuckles]

    5. DBDave Baszucki24:20

       I don't know if you've seen it.... where they have, they have a lot of virtual doppelgänger power.

    6. DBDave Baszucki24:25

       Yeah.

    7. DBDave Baszucki24:25

       And obviously, I'm not-- so Roblox is not doing dating. We're just talking about this right now-

    8. DBDave Baszucki24:31

       Right.

    9. DBDave Baszucki24:31

       -you know, blah, blah, blah, eighteen plus, ID verified, all of that.

    10. DBDave Baszucki24:34

        Yeah.

    11. DBDave Baszucki24:35

        So let's not go crazy, but let's think about a future, um, in the Black Mirror episode, where you literally can spawn the life of a thousand virtual doppelgängers. Um, that thousand virtual doppelgängers, you're on your new dating app, in three minutes, um, you know, someone else's virtual doppelgängers live a thousand virtual lives with your virtual doppelgänger, and then they say, "What's the success rate?" And when the, like, the thousand virtual doppelgängers say, "Ninety-eight percent of the time, we had a good life," then you say, "Oh, we should go on a date-

    12. DBDave Baszucki25:08

        Uh-huh.

    13. DBDave Baszucki25:08

        -or something."

    14. DBDave Baszucki25:09

        Yeah.

    15. DBDave Baszucki25:09

        So there's, um, I think-

    16. DBDave Baszucki25:10

        Like social simulation, that's the name-

    17. DBDave Baszucki25:12

        There's a lot of things-

    18. DBDave Baszucki25:13

        -use model [chuckles]

    19. DBDave Baszucki25:14

        ... we, I think, are gonna be really hard to project. I think one of the things we would focus on is the more we can just build raw, high-performance infrastructure, have AI as a service, have all of these things capable in a cloud, have the same thing run on a phone as a computer, have it auto-translate, hopefully, we would discover some of these things.

    20. DBDave Baszucki25:37

        Yeah, I'm, I'm really optimistic about that, given the engagement that people see with these companions as just a text interface with, like, the beginning of memory, right? Versus-

    21. DBDave Baszucki25:47

        Absolutely

    22. DBDave Baszucki25:47

        ... if you're Roblox, you have embodiment, you have, as you said, cloud persistence.

    23. DBDave Baszucki25:51

        That's right.

    24. DBDave Baszucki25:51

        And I think it's just gonna make the characters much more interesting very quickly.

    25. DBDave Baszucki25:54

        I'm thinking through how we would embody memory for NPCs, which is more than just, you know, a prompt. Um, one could imagine any NPC on Roblox, because we have recording of the whole thing, they actually have access to everything they've ever said or done in a very lean format. So they can go back through that, retrain on that, um, so that hopefully would be a native part of the platform. But I do know, yeah, there's a lot of interesting engagement with these types of companions, and imagining fully 3D versions will be, like, pretty fascinating.

    26. EGElad Gil26:29

        Yeah, a friend of mine basically asks, um, at dinner parties... He, he runs a well-known AI company, and his sort of controversial question for the group is often: What proportion of you think your children will have at least one serious relationship with an AI, like, throughout their lifetime?

    27. DBDave Baszucki26:43

        I think zero right now.

    28. EGElad Gil26:44

        Mm-hmm.

    29. DBDave Baszucki26:46

        I, I do. I don't-

    30. EGElad Gil26:46

        Yeah
11. 27:26 – 29:52

    Why Asset Costs Haven’t Changed the Gaming Industry

    1. DBDave Baszucki27:26

       valuable.

    2. EGElad Gil27:26

       Mm-hmm.

    3. DBDave Baszucki27:27

       Can I ask a, like, an industry perspective question-

    4. DBDave Baszucki27:29

       Yeah

    5. DBDave Baszucki27:29

       ... just given you've worked in gaming for a very long time now? Um, why do you think, uh-- like, there's a lot of discussion about how assets of different types are cheaper to create with generative tools. Um, I don't think that's really changed the dynamics of the gaming industry yet. I don't know if you would agree with that claim, or explain it.

    6. DBDave Baszucki27:49

       One could say, no matter how cheap it is to create assets, the expectation of quality from consumers goes up at exactly the same velocity.

    7. DBDave Baszucki27:57

       Okay. [chuckles]

    8. DBDave Baszucki27:58

       And so, you know, what was not possible a while ago-

    9. DBDave Baszucki28:02

       Yeah

    10. DBDave Baszucki28:02

        ... well, the, the expectation of consumers will go up. I think there's a, there's a general notion that the technology for the gaming industry has to move to f- cloud vertically integrated, and asset management can't just ship on a DVD or be a giant download.

    11. DBDave Baszucki28:25

        Uh-huh.

    12. DBDave Baszucki28:25

        I think we're, we're really seeing-- we've launched, um, dynamic LOD for textures, meshes is on the way. So you could imagine every single asset in the game, um, sound, uh, 3D object, image, can exist in various formats. Traditional format is, it's like a texture or a mesh or an audio file.

    13. DBDave Baszucki28:48

        Mm-hmm.

    14. DBDave Baszucki28:48

        Future format could be, it's an AI prompt, and it's generated procedurally on demand. So there's these two things. They're both very AI-enabled. One can then imagine that you have to be cloud connected, 'cause for all of these assets, you know, you have a full range of LOD, just like with video, uh, streaming, upsampling. On low-end devices, you need low LOD. High-end devices need 4K LOD, and ultimately, um, on-demand AI generation. That then gets into, um... Once again, one of the demos is probably on 3D upsampling. Um, the notion that if someone makes a very primitive experience on Roblox, they would augment it with a prompt, and they'd just say, "I know it's kind of primitive, but make it kind of look medieval and more realistic," and have all of those assets auto-upsample to, in 3D in the cloud for free on demand. That, uh, that kind of just-in-time thing is some of the stuff we're thinking about how AI can accelerate if you

12. 29:52 – 31:36

    AI Coding in Roblox Studio

    1. DBDave Baszucki29:52

       have a cloud platform.

    2. DBDave Baszucki29:53

       Roblox is also, from the studio perspective, one of the biggest development environments in the world.

    3. DBDave Baszucki29:58

       That's right.

    4. DBDave Baszucki29:59

       Uh, what are you seeing from the perspective of AI coding there?

    5. DBDave Baszucki30:02

       Yeah, so this is great. So once again, industry-standard ways of using a different model with Studio, so if you're in cloud code, you can control Studio, is super exciting. And so a lot of our users have started gluing these things together with, with the hope, ultimately, you know, they can build stuff from there. Roblox Studio itself is running a native assistant as well, and a native code engine, and I think the, the pattern for that is Roblox Studio will more and more for code follow many of those industry best practices, but in parallel, needs to have kind of an environmental generation kind of component that's very unique to that. And I think, I think the future of environmental generation is, once again, any prompt you can imagine-... text, image, video, possibly walking around in a world model to define a world. Having iterate on that, iterate on that to a primitive 3D skeleton, do I like it? And then iterating on that to a fully functional game. So as that, I think that's our vision, is to run those side by side, so first time studio user gets it out of the box, and at the same time, we, like, plug into all of your, um, AI workflow. I think the final thing is 'cause it's so cloud connected, that thing we talked about earlier, spinning up jobs, spinning up agents, running test plans, kind of keep grinding away, trying something, um, different, is like you have all of that cloud

13. 31:36 – 33:57

    The Roblox Creator Economy

    1. DBDave Baszucki31:36

       capability.

    2. DBDave Baszucki31:37

       Just out of curiosity, what is the, like, cycle of development for a successful Roblox game?

    3. DBDave Baszucki31:43

       The, um, what we have seen-

    4. DBDave Baszucki31:45

       Yeah

    5. DBDave Baszucki31:45

       ... is over the years, bigger teams, so that, you know, the top Roblox creators now are well into the tens and tens and thirties plus million a year. Like, it's really serious stuff. We have seen in the Roblox creator community, I think, a healthy sign that creator number one thousand, and what is their average yearly revenue, is going up faster than creator number one. So that's a bit of a healthy long tail, and I would say all the way out to creator thousand, there's such a huge community of people making a living. What I think our creators have found is it's gotten both more healthy but more competitive, and I think we've seen the pattern now of much more live ops in that. Because this is cloud, you can update your experience just like good websites every day or every week, and that, that is just kind of a constant practice. So I'd say update frequency, much more rapid.

    6. DBDave Baszucki32:45

       Mm-hmm. Which is great for users 'cause they get, uh, updated content at a faster rate and-

    7. DBDave Baszucki32:50

       That's right.

    8. DBDave Baszucki32:51

       Yeah.

    9. DBDave Baszucki32:51

       Users love updates. They love new things. It keeps games fresh. Um, so I think the, um, the other thing we, we have seen, we've, um... On the discovery side, we've tried to, and more and more taken the approach, we want discovery to be completely transparent. Um, like these are all the things that are going into the discovery algorithm. We, we check it. There's a benefit to that transparency and discovery, in that it actually keeps a lot of pressure on us. You know, "Oh, my gosh, someone's gonna game discovery."

    10. DBDave Baszucki33:26

        Uh-huh.

    11. DBDave Baszucki33:26

        "Well, then we better make it really good, right, and, and transparent." I actually think transparent discovery and recommendations is an interesting trend for the industry worth talking about. Um, but so, so with that, we have seen also the kind of the content distribution get richer and a little bit less spiky. There, there's now, like, the top twenty experiences on Roblox are all really good and all kind of vying for the number one slot, which maybe wasn't so true three or four

14. 33:57 – 37:50

    Long-Term Conviction vs. Weekly Iteration

    1. DBDave Baszucki33:57

       years ago.

    2. DBDave Baszucki33:58

       Zooming all the way out for a second, like I, I, I think it was true five or ten years ago when we met, um, it was true when I was talking to one of the members of your leadership team today.

    3. DBDave Baszucki34:07

       Yeah.

    4. DBDave Baszucki34:07

       They will say you're a extremely high conviction, very long-term-oriented leader, right? So the, the, you know, twenty-year plan for Roblox, and we're going to do things-

    5. DBDave Baszucki34:16

       Yeah

    6. DBDave Baszucki34:16

       ... the way we have a vision toward. You're obviously also all in on AI, right? Very excited about the technologies and investing in them. How do you, like, square these things, w- where you have a very long-term view when so much is happening in the environment all the time?

    7. DBDave Baszucki34:29

       I think we, um, we always want to pair, take the long view, which is one of our four big values, with get stuff done. And so, um, the-- it's almost like in those old Gartner charts-

    8. DBDave Baszucki34:41

       Yeah

    9. DBDave Baszucki34:41

       ... you know, take the long view, not take the long view-

    10. DBDave Baszucki34:44

        Yeah

    11. DBDave Baszucki34:44

        ... get stuff done, not take the stuff.

    12. DBDave Baszucki34:47

        Yes.

    13. DBDave Baszucki34:47

        Like, the magic quadrant is take the long view, get stuff done. We, we typically mean inside the company, rapid iteration. And so if someone has a view of some exciting new product, and we're going to ship it in six months, that can be a very, um, scary thing unless it can be broken down to, like, we're going to ship this thing every week and iterate towards this, but we have a good target of where we're going. And so I think inside the company, we... I'd say our AI team, our facial age estimation team, our safety team, w- these are literally things working on a weekly basis-

    14. DBDave Baszucki35:26

        Mm-hmm

    15. DBDave Baszucki35:26

        ... which allows a fairly fast reaction time. AI, I think, is arguably, as far as speed right now, just every day.

    16. DBDave Baszucki35:36

        But you mean-- y- y- you make it sound pretty simple in that, like, all the things that you're trying to get done on a week or a six-month timescale, they're all aligned toward a vision that, like-

    17. DBDave Baszucki35:46

        I think if you-

    18. DBDave Baszucki35:46

        ... isn't really affected by it

    19. DBDave Baszucki35:46

        ... if you have your six- to twelve-month vision-

    20. DBDave Baszucki35:49

        Yeah

    21. DBDave Baszucki35:49

        ... hopefully, that's moving not too fast.

    22. DBDave Baszucki35:53

        Mm-hmm.

    23. DBDave Baszucki35:53

        Um, but at the same time, the weekly iterations are moving very quickly in that direction. And, and you know, the, you could say the Roblox vision is ultimately to build the Holodeck, and it's ten thousand people. It's multiplayer, real-time modification of the environment. It's NPCs.

    24. DBDave Baszucki36:12

        Mm-hmm.

    25. DBDave Baszucki36:12

        Photorealistic. That's a pretty stable spec for twenty years.

    26. DBDave Baszucki36:17

        Yeah.

    27. DBDave Baszucki36:17

        And so then-

    28. DBDave Baszucki36:17

        I actually feel like that's the biggest takeaway for me here. Like, w- I, I spend a lot of time with, um, software CEOs-

    29. DBDave Baszucki36:23

        Yeah

    30. DBDave Baszucki36:23

        ... right? And I think there's a lot of actual concern about, like, is the vision we had for the company in terms of its durability or its value, uh, still as valuable as we thought five years ago? And for Roblox, perhaps because you were, you know, pointing at something so far away to begin with, it's, like, pretty clear, you know-
15. 37:50 – 43:44

    Dave’s Hiring Philosophy for Roblox

    1. EGElad Gil37:50

       One other thing that I think that, um, Roblox has done uniquely well is, uh, how you've thought about hiring and how you've, you've rethought certain aspects of that.

    2. DBDave Baszucki37:59

       Yeah.

    3. EGElad Gil37:59

       And I think that's really led to people who have more bias to action, who are moving quickly, who are iterating rapidly. Um, can you talk a little about how you've rethought some aspects of that, if you're willing to share that as part of this?

    4. DBDave Baszucki38:08

       Yeah, I mean, one is we've been very public that we, we really want values-aligned people that are good problem solvers, that are very creative, and it's hard to do signal to noise in that kind of a hiring thing. So what-- We actually bought a company about five years ago that was tr- doing their best scientifically to build 3D assessment tooling for some big companies to really find people who are problem solvers and creative thinkers.

    5. EGElad Gil38:41

       That's part of what I was referring to.

    6. DBDave Baszucki38:42

       Yeah, yeah.

    7. EGElad Gil38:42

       I thought it was fascinating that you made that acquisition.

    8. DBDave Baszucki38:44

       So we, we, we bought Imbellus. We got a great team of scientists, people that had been involved with the SAT test and all of that, and we've tuned that to our new college grad intern program. So far, we've essentially, I believe, in a very fair, meritocracy kind of way, taken the... whatever it is, ten, fifty, sixty thousand people, run them all through what we've, I think, shown to be somewhat of a very fair, non-weighted by any other social factor assessment. And the people that come out of there, we have an incredible confidence that they're problem solvers, um, they do a bunch of other things really well. So we, we kind of have this building wave inside the company of three years ago, two years ago, one year ago, of these one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred people, that hopefully we're, like, mentoring some of the best future leaders in the industry.

    9. EGElad Gil39:42

       Yeah, super interesting, 'cause I have a number of friends who always talk about how you discover untapped sources of talent-

    10. DBDave Baszucki39:47

        That's right

    11. EGElad Gil39:47

        ... or how you find the best people in the world, and are there ways to test for that or sort of screen for that?

    12. DBDave Baszucki39:51

        We- we've done a lot of testing on this, fairness testing. Um, looking backwards on it, I'm, I'm very confident in where it's gonna go for us.

    13. EGElad Gil40:02

        Super interesting.

    14. DBDave Baszucki40:02

        Yeah, it's, it's like a very systems-oriented approach. The one thing I, I've-- we have found, which is a little edgy, might be the correlation between traditional universities and our own testing. And, and we, we hire-

    15. SGSarah Guo40:17

        Sorry, what's edgy about that?

    16. DBDave Baszucki40:19

        Well, I think people typically think, like, "I went to Stanford. That's where all the top talent is."

    17. SGSarah Guo40:23

        Oh.

    18. DBDave Baszucki40:23

        We have found that not necessarily to be true.

    19. SGSarah Guo40:25

        Mm-hmm.

    20. DBDave Baszucki40:26

        And, and we have found community college, you know, the small Midwestern engineering school. Like, because we're assessing our own way, we, we kinda, we basically ignore the signal of where you went to university.

    21. EGElad Gil40:39

        I've heard that anecdotally from other CEOs now, particularly for certain cohorts, like the cohort that came during COVID.

    22. DBDave Baszucki40:45

        Yeah.

    23. EGElad Gil40:45

        For a lot of the top universities, it's perceived as, like, a weaker cohort. Um, and I don't know the reason or the interpretation behind it, but it's interesting to see this shift, um, in terms of how people even think about where is some of the best talent.

    24. DBDave Baszucki40:57

        Yeah.

    25. EGElad Gil40:57

        So it's interesting that you're kinda saying that as well.

    26. DBDave Baszucki40:58

        So, so we get, we get to be, have self-determination. We get to say, "Colleges, you do what you want."

    27. EGElad Gil41:03

        Uh-huh.

    28. DBDave Baszucki41:04

        "All of that." We're just gonna do it in a fair way that we think is our way, and it's worked out.

    29. SGSarah Guo41:10

        Can you give just, uh, because it's so interesting, like, any intuition for something you... some way you test for problem-solving capability?

    30. DBDave Baszucki41:18

        W- I think we make public some of the tests that we use.

Episode duration: 43:44